Everise acquires Hyperlab to inject AI into the BPO/customer service industry

By Digital News Asia September 24, 2018

EVERISE announces on Sept 24 the acquisition of Hyperlab, a Southeast Asian Conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI) company. The acquisition will see Everise take a majority stake in the Malaysia-based company, adding Hyperlab to its own suite of solutions that allow its clients to interact with their customers at a time, place and channel of their choosing.

Through leveraging on Hyperlab’s expertise in automating customer support and sales at scale, Everise will be able to deliver increasing efficiency for its clients, while continuing to meet ever-growing customer expectations.

Specialising in local Southeast Asian dialects has helped Hyperlab grow quickly. Since its founding, Hyperlab’s CX and EX solutions have accrued over three million minutes of conversational data in English, Bahasa Malaysia, Manglish (colloquial Malaysian), Singlish (Singaporean English) and Chinese, and their chatbots have had conversations with over 1,000,000 unique users around the world. Hyperlab are currently in the process of developing a Spanish speaking chatbot for the US market.

“Our acquisition of Hyperlab is the latest stage of our journey to becoming a true experience company, one that drives innovation and disruption in the BPO industry,” said Sudhir Agarwal, CEO of Everise.

Agarwal added, “Hyperlab will provide a significant boost in capabilities to both Everise and our clients allowing us to interact with customers online in multiple Southeast Asian dialects, handle more interactions more efficiently, automate more tasks, reduce costs and generate actionable data and analytics.

“When this is married to quality human-to-human engagement we will start to see the evolution of a highly effective customer service ecosystem that easily and smoothly spans the online and physical worlds. These are exciting times for Everise, our clients, and the wider BPO industry.”

Using their Automation Affinity planning tool, Hyperlab works with some of Asia-Pacific’s largest Financial Services and Telecommunications brands, including Maxis, Hong Leong Bank and Zurich Insurance, to transition their human workforce to a blended or even fully autonomous digital workforce.

“Hyperlab is a true example of the wealth of start-up talent that exists in the region,” says Atul Kapur, co-founder of Everstone and Board Member of Everise. He added, “the company’s highly conversational AI solutions will integrate perfectly into our own BPO solutions and will allow us to provide an even higher level of customer service, at scale and at lower cost, for our clients.

“Everise will continue to partner with companies large and small who we feel are able to provide solutions for our clients. The sophisticated AI solutions provided by Hyperlab fit our model, enabling customer service functions to be handled quickly and efficiently online, resulting in happier customers and actionable data.”

“We specialise in providing Conversational AI solutions that are highly localised and deeply integrated into the business we work with. This, paired with our native Natural Language Understanding technology and vast experience designing great customer experiences means we can support customer service functions at a level of quality and efficiency that others simply cannot” says Vic Sithasanan, co-founder of Hyperlab, continuing “merging these capabilities with Everise’s own customer service functions will allow us to provide an even higher level of customer service, at scale and at lower cost, for Everise’s clients – many of whom are some of the largest companies in the world – and the wider BPO industry”

Everise’s acquisition of Hyperlab follows its recent partnership in March 2018 with Microsoft, which saw the two firms develop an Artificial Intelligence (AI) platform to disrupt the Contact Center and BPO industry through an omni-channel customer service solution that targets voice, video and text interactions.

This will empower Everise to deliver an unprecedented intelligent, customer-centric experience by leveraging the power of AI. The resulting C3 Labs incubate and develop AI solutions for the BPO industry, enabling firms to bridge the online and physical worlds, and automating time consuming tasks that then enable BPO employees to concentrate on higher value customer-centric work.

Hyperlab will join Everise’s suite of companies as a subsidiary and continue to be based in Malaysia as they grow into strategic markets. The core team of Hyperlab, Vic Sithasanan, Janet Teo, and Chris Greenough, will join the Everise group of companies under its technology arm.